Advertisers and other business entities are increasingly interested in information regarding consumers. Approximate statistics, such as readership of a newspaper, or ratings of a television program, are often insufficient because the advertiser cannot know how many of those readers or viewers actually viewed the advertisement. With the rise of Internet advertising, advertisers may be given information regarding a number of times their ad was rendered on a display, or the number of times someone “clicked through” to view a website pointed to by the advertisement. These are measures of the number of impressions the advertisement made, where an impression results from a person perceiving an advertisement.
Information regarding readership, viewership, or number of displays or clickthroughs of an advertisement, falls short of providing information about the actual people who viewed the ad, and whether or not they acted after viewing the ad by, for example, purchasing a product highlighted in the advertisement. Personal information regarding consumers of advertising would be valuable to advertisers in order to improve the targeting of their ad and to receive feedback on the effectiveness of the advertising.